Hearing the harangues of the zanies in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll is like listening to a radio talk show in which each caller is encouraged to ramble on until he has described his whole, warped worldview. It's not talk radio, it's tirade radio - ''ti-radio,'' if you will.

One by one, the people of SDR&R appear on stage and begin speaking, either directly to the audience or to an invisible interlocutor. All 10 are male and white, and all appear to reside in the New York City area (including parts of New Jersey). Other than this, they don't have much in common - except that each is played by performance-artist Eric Bogosian, who also wrote the script.

Although the lives of these characters don't interconnect, their obsessions do. Most of them have something to say about either sex, drugs, rock music or all three, and their ideas about these things help to hold this often-hilarious picture together.

A subway beggar, the first character to emerge, tells us (twice) that he is not a drug addict while admitting that he takes illegal drugs to control the pain that he would take legal drugs for - if he had the money to buy them. (Hmmm . . . ) The next man up, a British rock star who confesses that he was once a ''bona fide drug addict,'' claims to have reformed and, after experiencing a revelation while watching Donahue, to have dedicated himself to raising money for the poor of the planet.

''We are the world, so to speak,'' he remarks fatuously.

Like the beggar, several other characters in SDR&R are out on the lunatic fringe. We hear from two additional street people, and their structured rants suggest what rap music would sound like if it were as sensitive to the textures of language as it is to the rhythms of words. We also meet a pair of struggling artists, one of whom (the last character to appear in the film) is so fearful of being co-opted by the powers that be that he refuses to produce any art.

As for the Establishment side of this loony menagerie, it's covered by a swinish radio exec (who claims to be true to his '60s ideals because he's free enough to cheat on his wife) and a 51-year-old bourgeois with a Havana cigar and a new swimming pool. ''Take care of the luxuries,'' this man advises. ''The necessities take care of themselves.''

Perhaps the happiest people in this film are a young party animal who relates a bachelor-party story and a barroom buckaroo who can, as he tells it, have any woman he wants because he's exceptionally well-endowed. (''Ever see a girl cry because she's so happy? . . . I have.'') These guys are rescued from the guilt and despair that haunts some of the others because they're not even minimally introspective.

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll - which began as a stage show - was filmed last December before live audiences at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. Nine performances were shot, from which sections were culled for the movie (which opens in Central Florida today).

Most of the time, director John McNaughton (Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer) keeps out of the way, unobtrusively capturing the nuances of Bogosian's performance. (An exception is the director's distracting use of quick close-up shots during the penultimate monologue.) Ernest Dickerson's cinematography isn't as expressive as it is in the movies of Spike Lee, but it more than gets the job done.

Bogosian (who co-wrote and starred in the 1988 Talk Radio, which also began as a theater piece) takes a minimalist approach to stagecraft. There are a simple set, no fancy costumes and only a few basic props.

And this performance artist is not, in any sense, your typical movie star. He sends out hostile vibes which, to his credit, he has learned to use to his advantage by creating antipathetic characters.

As a comic chameleon, the mop-topped Bogosian is impressive although he's not really in the same league as, say, Martin Short, or Carol Burnett at her best. But Bogosian's ideas are what's most impressive about him, and, besides, he isn't concerned with creating true-to-life characters or even precise caricatures.

''My characters are totally intuitive,'' he has said. ''They are not meant to be photographs out of life. They are photographs out of my mind.''

Considered together, these 10 men help to express Bogosian's worldview, some of them by reflecting its opposite. Bogosian's view seems close to that of the alienated artist who refuses to create but also appears to include elements of several other characters. (The most reprehensible people on stage seem to embody the reasons that the other people in the show can't get a break in life.)